Collaboration Gone Awry: A Struggle for Power and Control over Service Delivery in the Non-Profit Sector

Summary

This simulation demonstrates that the ACSADV was not doing collaboration well to effectively meet the needs of those who experience sexual assault and/or domestic violence in this community. Power and politics, organizational characteristics, and heterogeneous visions and cultures made it challenging for each member organization to have an equal voice and shared understanding of the work of the committee. However, the commitment of each organization to continue to try and work together despite the challenges they face indicates that there exists opportunity in this case to ameliorate the situation and improve collaboration. At its most recent meeting, members of the ACSADV identified that addressing the issues that were making the collaboration ineffective needed to be a primary goal at their next meeting. Your task is to start some of the hard conversations that need to happen in order to make this collaboration work and to collectively identify some practical steps that your organizations need to take to become a unified and ultimately a more effective collaboration.